A year after the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbying group delivered a secret multimillion-dollar donation to congressional Republicans, GOP lawmakers quietly defanged rules lowering the price of life-saving medicines.

Weakening these rules helped turn the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America’s (PhRMA) $4 million dark-money contribution into an $8 billion windfall for drugmakers, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate.

Records obtained by political watchdog group Issue One show that PhRMA last year gave millions to a Republican-aligned dark money group boosting Republican candidates’ campaigns across the country.

PhRMA — which represents companies like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Bayer, among others — shelled out more than $5.6 million in political donations last year, including a $4 million donation to the American Action Network, a dark-money group aligned with House Republican leadership. Between 2020 and 2023, PhRMA funneled $17.5 million to the dark-money group.

The American Action Network has spent millions boosting House Republican candidates. That includes more than $55 million in 2024 supporting GOP candidates in battleground districts. The dark-money group’s sister organization, the American Action Forum, lobbies for pharmaceutical interests under the guise of patient advocacy.

This year, Republican congressional majorities handed the pharmaceutical industry a series of victories, including rolling back many Biden-era rules on the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation program, which attempted to lower drug prices for Americans, who already spend more on their medications than any other country.

Among those concessions was an ongoing effort to repeal the “pill penalty,” a Biden-era Medicare pricing rule that would have allowed the government to speed up its efforts to lower the prices of drugs delivered in pill form. After the rule was challenged by PhRMA, the Trump administration directed the Department of Health and Human Services to work with Congress to eliminate it.

Big Pharma scored other key policy wins in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The tax-cut law tweaked Medicare price negotiation rules to exempt orphan drugs — specialized and often lifesaving medications for which no alternatives exist — even though drugmakers enjoy significant tax credits, fee exemptions, market exclusivities, and comparatively higher pricing for these drugs.

The legislation also increased the number of other drugs excluded from the price negotiation program, exemptions that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will save the industry $8.8 billion over the next decade. These exclusions included several blockbuster cancer and rare disease drugs, raising out-of-pocket costs for seniors and people with disabilities.

The American Action Network, flush with PhRMA cash, spent $4 million promoting the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

PhRMA has spent more than $34 million lobbying the federal government so far this year, part of an ongoing pharmaceutical lobbying boom. In total, the pharmaceutical industry has spent nearly $150 million lobbying and hired an army of hundreds of lobbyists in 2025.